Re: unnecessary fringe-indicators defcustom creates trouble

[Luc Teirlinck <teirllm@dms.auburn.edu>]

>From my previous message:

   for instance, just using indicate-buffer-boundaries it is
   impossible to tell whether a buffer is completely empty or whether
   you are completely overscrolled.

To be more concrete, enable all boundary indicators, including arrows,
to the left.  Create an empty buffer.  The boundary indicators
actually give the impression that the buffer is non-empty.  Typing RET
does not change the indicators, so you can not tell whether the buffer
is empty or not.

Now overscroll a buffer ending in a newline completely.  The "Bottom"
indicator now suggests that there is an extra blank line at the end of
the buffer, whereas there is not.  Note that if you put point on line
4 or line 5 of the scratch buffer (with its default initial content)
and do M-0 C-l, the result looks exactly the same.  In the first case,
the indicated blank line is real, in the second it is fake, but you
can not tell the difference.  This one is very confusing.
Inexperienced users often overscroll completely (by accident), which
often confuses them.  indicate-empty-lines shows them what happened,
whereas indicate-buffer-boundaries gives them the impression that the
reason why they were able to scroll this far was the extra blank line
at the end of the buffer.

I wonder whether it would not be more logical to not show any
indicators in an empty buffer and to just show an up arrow in a
completely overscrolled buffer.  You can not see the end of the
buffer, it is scrolled out of view.  So why indicate it?

Sincerely,

Luc.